"I know it is the en vogue thing now to downplay any human differences, but I think it is providing a blindspot to some true differences that a linguistically evolved brain provides the human animal. Having this capacity means we are constantly creating reasons for making decisions."

Animal reward systems, like human ones, are not stimulus-response mechanisms, but cognitive interpretive ones. What constitutes punishment or reward is relative to our conceptual aims(yes, animals have concepts, even without formal language).

"It is just amazing that we allow ourselves to do this."

It would be amazing if it worked. Reasons we create out of whole cloth dont fool ourselves. If we were able to successfully create out of whole cloth deceptive reasons for doing something, we wouldn't even need to talk about deception. We could just exist as pure subjectivities able to fabricate whatever reality we chose. Reasons have to connect organically to coping with circumstances such as to change our perception of those circumstances in an effective way. THAT'S when human coping skills are truly amazing. Simply telling ourselves something will act as no more than a hypothesis to be tested in our actual engagement with the world, and if it cannot pragmatically alter such engagement positively we will know it as a failure.

The fact that you call coping strategies deceptions means you recognize that we are aware that such strategies don't accurately describe and make sense of a situation they are designed to help us get through.

A worker using such strategies is also aware of the fact that a story he tells himself to feel better about being stuck in a job wont be effective unless it has truth to it relative to his real situation. That's why self- deceptions act as no more than a thin veneer over our suffering. They don't succeed in fooling us. If you ask anyone who you think is using such techniques how they really FEEL about their job, how their body is manifesting the stress of the job though ulcers, high blood pressure and muscle spasms , they will be able to be quite accurate about their assessment of their situation, in SPITE of their rationalization, which may have been designed more for your benefit than theirs.

I mentioned two ways to understand the process of coping with unpleasant reality. The first is through moment to moment, hour to hour and day to day oscillations in punishment-reward assessment. Again , this is not a stimulus- response mechanism but a dynamically active interpretive conceptualization and reconceptualization of what is perceived by us to be genuinely rewarding or punishing to us relative to our meaningful goals, values and sense of self.
The second way to understand a situation is related to the first as a metalevel of conceptual-valuative assessment. This pertains to the global difference between a job which is overall rewarding and satisfying but has moments of unpleasantness, vs a job that may have a few moments here and there of reward but is on the whole unsatisfying. The first instance would be akin to watching a suspenseful or scary movie. The moments of anxiety are overwhelmed by the overall positive experience of having overcome situations without having been placed into too much suffering. The second situation of overwhelming lack of satisfaction happens when there is a lot at stake for us in terms of pride, goals, self-respect. That is, features of a situation that impact deeply on our sense of ourselves. That is not something a bandaid like self-deception can ameliorate.

Self-deceptions dont work. We make our way through much of life's unpleasantness knowing, and FEELING full well what is lacking for us in our experience.
A self-deception is not adaptive in pragmatic coping except in the most superficial way, like putting lipstick on a pig.
What seems to be missing from your analysis of human reason is that human values and motives are tied to the fact that there is an internal integrity or self-consistency to the organization of meaning that we carry with us into situations to allow us to interpret what we expereince coherently. Satisfaction and dissatisfaction are perceived relative to the way that the world matches up to or invalidates our ongoing hypotheses of it.

Values are not something we 'take on' as a purely free choice, and are inseparable from understanding. Value comes from evaluation which implies interpretation which is fundamental to any cognizing organism.
In fact your use of the word 'value' comes from Nietzsche's notion of value system, which he recognized as common to all organisms.

Every account of the world organizes itself as a value system. Since all animals cognize, they all have values just as we do, and ambivalence, wavering , anxiety are shown by intelligent animals in situations of value conflicts. A dog's ambivalence and anxiety can be triggered by such conflicts due to the particulars of his socialization within the culture of his pack(human or dog).

Maybe what youre trying to get at by your claim that values are 'fooling ourselves' is something like the idea of cognitive dissonance or Freudian repression. These are forms of self-deception in that one part of the mind knows something that it hides from the other for adaptive reasons.

Of course not all psychologists accept the model of repression, instead arguing that we dont have to assume self-decepetion in order to explain how we slog through something unpleasant. One doesn't misrepresent their values to themselves, they explicitly construe themselves as the kind of person who is tolerating unplesantness because the world is the kind of place where unpleasant situation arise often, and more importantly, I am the kind of person who is willing to tolerate the unpleasant.. Built into this valuative framework may be a kind of admittance of failure, disappointment and frustration, but that is not a self-deception, it is a kind of question mark.

We construct value systems all the time which express our puzzlement at why and how we ended up in such apparently unresolvable situations when according to our previous self-valuation we thought of ourselves as the kind of person who would not tolerate such things. Our finding ourselves persevering through distasteful experience can then be thought of as a kind of crisis in our self-construal, a recognition that the template by which we measured ourselves , and our role with respect to others(I'm the kind of person who does not settle, who has too much pride and dignity,etc), has proved to be unworkable. If we have no way of 'repairing' , that is, of reconstruing our sense of ourselves through a more robust value system that explains to ourselves our failure to live up to our expectations, then we will slog though our miserable job feeling like a confused failure.

There is no internal dishonesty involved in such constructions of our world. The fact that they are accurate representations of the way we are attempting to understand our plight is evidenced by the possibility that we can , through further reflection and reconstrual, come to some resolution of our confusion, ambivalence and frustration. Not by pretending we suddenly like what we;re doing, but by, for example, coming to understand why we compromised our initial values, why we failed to uphold those values. Its also important to break down precisely what it is in a job that produces the sensation of unpleasantness. It may not be the job 'as a whole' but certain of parts of it, Do we then have to fool ourselves to get through those moments? How does an animal gnaw its paw off to escape from a trap?

How does it slog through this unpleasantness? By pretending gnawing its appendage off doesnt hurt so much? Obviously not. The animal's perception shifts back and forth between the pain of extricating itself and the pain of and fear of being trapped. At one moment one perception wins out and the animal stops trying to free itself,and the next moment the fear overwhelms the pain and it recommences its attempt to escape. This oscillation between anticipation of pain and reward explains many human behaviors in situations of ambivalence and unpleasantness, such as addiction. No account of self-deception is needed to explain perseverance through the unpleasant via oscillation between perception of reward and punishment, only a long memory. IF we remain at a lousy job, we know which perception has won out, but not likely completely, as I mentioned above. Reward may have just barely overcome punishment to allow for our perseverance, but often the price we pay is a crisis of personal identity that sometimes leads to explosive violence, which is ever more common these days.

"Just because they have some "self-reflective' capacities, doesn't mean that they can have "ennui" about their situation, or understand that they are "radically free", or any other conception."

I would agree with you, but the issue for me is whether that human advantage comes from a qualitatively different capacity, as I think Sartre would want to argue, or simply a point of greater complexity on a spectrum we share with other animals. That's where I think Sartre's concepts of 'freedom' , self-consciousness, self-reflection and the Will are key. Because if we buy into his understanding of what makes humans unique in this respect, we will believe in a qualitative break between humans and other sentient beings.

On the other hand, if we go with recent thinking in cognitive science as well as contributions from philosophers like Freud, Nietzsche and others, we can abandon the idea that meta-cognition is a matter of there being as self that can survey the domain of its experience without its very nature being transformed. That is to say, if knowing is a form of self-transforming interaction with a world, then reflection is not controlled by a self so much as what we call a self is a momentary scheme of understanding which is controlled and shaped and transformed by a changing situation. Seen this way, we do not will or direct what or how we reflect so much as we find ourselves being directed toward certain forms of adaptive modification of our schemes of understanding and assessment within contextual situations.

It is only after the fact that we claim that we 'willed' ourselves into cognitive strategies of coping. So I can agree with you that we move through these situations with a much more sophisticated level of strategic complexity than other animals. But I would tend to de-emphasize Sartre's championing the 'radical' freedom of human thinking , to the extent that he conceives of it in terms of a volunteerism or agency of the self, a 'choosing' to will, rather than finding oneself willing. We are no more free than what we will, and what we will is not within our control.This makes us no more free than other animals. dont get me wrong . I am not a strict determinist with regard to either animals or humans. I just think in both cases freedom is not something that is owned by a self.


Sartre never fully embraced the insights of evolutionary biology as regards the organization of human motivation(this is why he rejected Freud and pragmatism) and this shows in his notion of human freedom. He wanted to keep the metaphysical notion of freedom that he inherited from German Idealism(Will as pure self-awareness) even though he proclaimed himself an atheist.

In sum, I see Sartre's animal-human dichotomy as between automatic , instinctive causal mechanism on the one hand and human capacity for self-knowing on the other(sounds very Cartesian to me).
Contemporary cognitive science argues that behavior of intelligent animals is characterized primarily by intentionally directed, affectively organized cognition just as is human thought. The strength of human thinking lies not in the pure awareness of a self, but on the contrary, in the variability of the ways, moment to moment, humans adaptively change this contingent self. Both humans and and other animals are basically evolutionarily adaptive self-transformation machines. We simply outperfom other creatures in our speed and variability of self-modification. But we can hardly give ourselves credit for this without first recognizing that this 'self' that we want to champion doesnt survive the modifications of thinking intact. Self is as much a temporary byproduct as it is commander. Deception, distraction and narrative could just as accurately be described as that which forms and reforms a self as they would be its handiwork.

"Although there are some parallels, I think you are overselling it. Humans have the capacity for a full-fledged language system. This allows for all sorts of things animals just cant' do, including self-talk and self-reflection. We can start a project not wanting to do the project. We can work on the project and evaluate as we are doing it, and we can look back on a project and evaluate how we liked it. Interesting enough, we probably use differing coping strategies to adapt to all three stages in a project we are dissatisfied with. We may start the project out of fear of getting fired, for example (amongst other reasons). We may be immersed in the project while doing it (effectively trying to zone everything out), or on the opposite end, we may distract ourselves by listening to music, doing the project at a slower or faster pace than normal, underperform, overperform, etc. etc. After the project, the human brain tends to get all pollyannaish and forget its distastefulness and say, "it wasn't that bad, but I still didn't like it". And on and on it goes."

Even without the use of formal language , animals do symbolize their experieince in that they interpret their world to themselves. This is how dolphins and certain primates can achieve all the steps you just mentioned in a rudimentary way without linguistic conceptualization.

"According to one of the leading scholars in the field, there is an emerging consensus among scientists that animals share functional parallels with humans' conscious metacognition -- that is, our ability to reflect on our own mental processes and guide and optimize them."

"Smith inaugurated animal metacognition as a new field of study in 1995 with research on a bottlenosed dolphin. The dolphin assessed correctly when the experimenter's trials were too difficult for him, and adaptively declined to complete those trials."

"his second article by Smith and colleagues also supports the consensus that animals share with humans a form of the self-reflective, metacognitive capacity. In all respects," says Smith, "their capacity for uncertainty monitoring, and for responding to uncertainty adaptively, show close correspondence to the same processes in humans."
http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2012/03/13292.html

"We are the only species that contends with this and the reason is our very own self-aware nature."

Sartre believed we are self-aware. Freud didnt, and neither do postmodern philosophies (Heidegger, Derrida) or the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, Sartre's contemporary). These thinkers explained the skills you describe not as a composed self turning back to itself, but as a changing series of interactions with the world . These skills are just more complex versions of the sorts of metal adjustments that higher mammals make all the time to challenging situations. Can other animals deliberately use mental strategies? Yes, in a rudimentary way. For instance, dogs can display compulsive or ritualized behaviour that serves the function of mental soothing, even though it doesnt represent a pragmatic action directed at an object in the world. A trained dog will wait patiently for its master even though it is becoming anxious, and may use techniques such as whining to sooth itself and in order to 'do a distasteful job'. does it know its choices? Do we? What does it mean for us to know our choices and is this something we assess all at once, in advance, as surveyors of the realm? Or do we find ourselves discovering what constitutes our choices as our circumstances unfold for us, just as other mammals do?

"It is amazing we are able to get ourselves this far using these techniques."

What exactly is it that is amazing? Enactivist approaches in cognitive psychology are tracing the capabilities of sense-making to the most rudimentary self-organized living systems , so if our skills are amazing, then you can thank the paramecium, because in essence, single celled animals have the same skills(anticipatory cognition), only more complex in humans. Again , a matter of degree, not kind.

" I think this directly goes at Sartre's understanding that we are free but we choose to sometimes play a role and have bad faith."
Our freedom is limited by the constraints of our cultural embeddedness as well as our personal history. Most of what shapes our thinking is outside of our awareness(subpersonal bodily affect and perceptual processes, social cues). What most people think of consciousness is just a thin veneer of of mostly linguistic conceptualization on top of a complex web of subpersonal processes.
Since a dog's cognition is also anticipatory rather than being bound to a purely immediate present, they share the dynamics of our freedom, but within a more constricted temporal horizon of anticipation.

"We don't t just "do" something without self-reflection."

We always just do something, but the doing is future oriented. A doing is an intending and an intending points beyond itself. So what we call reflection arises out of this always beyond itself of intending . This is what gives our purposes and goals their thread of consistency, or what you call 'reflection'. Your cat thinks intentionally also. Watch it become distracted by a noise while it is in the middle of a task. What causes it to return to the task which was interrupted? Because it continues to have the ongoing intention of the task in mind. It reflects back on its purpose.
This continuing to have in mind( a better description would be the ongoing transformation of intentional acts) is what reflection is. We can glorify and fetishize our own more elaborated version of it in order to gush about how unique and free we are relative to the rest of the animal kingdom, but I think animal behavioral research is increasingly coming to the opinion that our reflective skills are not special and unique in themselves, only our ability to transform our intentions in a way that is more tightly self-consistent than other animals. This leads to our superior ability to strategize and plan, but such skills are also present on other animals.

The answer to your question 'how do we keep doing distasteful tasks' is presupposed in the question. We keep doing distasteful task because they arent so distasteful that we can no longer tolerate doing them. We can create a multidimensional spectrum of attitudes toward a job, from absolutely intolerable to blissful. Your question concerns a certain middle range of ambivalence, where we may go back and forth between being tempted to quit, and where not only our decision whether to keep working, but HOW we work, is affected by our assessment of the job. We could work more slowly , take more breaks, find distractions. Then what we are doing is changing the nature of the job itself and thats our solution, and that of course is not a narrative, habit or deception.

If the real gist of your question is 'What techniques can people suggest to help one get through an unpleasant situation'?, then self-distraction and deception are certainly among those techniques. More effective, but more difficult, is to find a way to make the job more meaningful , and that involves more than a deception or habit. You could call it a narrative, but it has to be true in some sense. Try reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Another technique could work if there arent too many distractions on the job. If its something that allows one the quiet to daydream one could train oneself to create in one's head(a story, an idea, poetry, building something). Using one;s imagination this way makes the time go much faster. Many find that immersing oneself aggressively into the work also makes the time go faster than trying to do less. Boredom can be the worst aspect of a job.

So immersion may be the key. Either immersion in one's own substantive imagination, immersion in the job, or even immersion in a zen-like state of nothingness where one performs in an altered state.
Some of these are habits, some are deceptions, but the most effective are also the most difficult, involving real use of creativity to transport oneself either more deeply into the work or deeply into another realm while working at the same time(kind of like how one can drive while not remembering driving.because one is immersed in an interesting podcast). Notice how the first day of work after a vacation often doesnt seem as bad because your head is still in that other place. What a person does when they're not working can have an effect on how the job feels to them, how trapped they feel they are, how much hope they have for escape from it, where else they can allow their mind to wander to. IF all one has is the one job that is distasteful to them ,and they have no hobbies, interests, social life outside of that work, it will be particularly hellish. IF , on the other hand, they are take classes after or before work, or involved in a challenging, growth promoting and rewarding activity of some kind, this will almost certainly make its way into their thinking during work and make that work seem less onerous.

When we abandon the idea of thinking of the goodness or badness of a task as a thing, a concept hermetically sealed unto itself, then we can also abandon the idea of reflection as something secondary, peripheral ,or parasitic to the originating 'Concept' ( the value for us of a task). The reason we can continue to do something we dont like is that liking or not liking is an ongoing assessment that is always changing relative to itself. The very meaning of the task therefore is changing via our ongoing changing assessment of it. It always means something slightly different as we reflect back on it . We don't need to manipulate or trick ourselves into thinking of it as something other than what it is, because it isnt simply a single static concept in the first place. One minute we can decide that we cant do this job because it is so distasteful. The next minute we can change our mind because maybe its not so bad. The next minute we can think that yes it is so bad but we need the money so that makes it tolerable. These arent just mental tricks. They go directly to the core of the changing meaning of the badness or goodness of the job. Badness or goodness is never one simple thing, it is relative to a whole host of contextual considerations. We're not lying to or tricking ourselves when reflectiion reveals to us new considerations.

i don't buy the notion that reflection is a separate process from doing.
To reflect on something is itself a kind of further doing, a continued modification of one's relationship to that one is involved in. One should be careful in making sharp dichotomous distinctions between what humans can supposedly do that other animals cant. Most of those distinctions have had to be abandoned (tool use, culture, language, cognition, feeling, empathy, etc). Animals display ambivalence and modulations in their attitude toward an object of concern just as humans do. Its simply a matter of degree. What we have that other animals dont to the same degree is a kind of sustained memory for abstract examination and comparison. In most cases this capacity is what allows us to escape from the kind of terror and rage that other animals succumb to as a a result of the inability to undergo sustained conceptual attention. For every example of human misery caused by reflection there are many more of escape from misery due to the ability to clarify situations. It comes down to whether you think ignorance is bliss.
Would you really rather relive your childhood than have the reflective capacities of an adult? My guess is most are happier overall as adults than they were as children, despite the intensity of joy and simple pleasure that seems to be uniquely associated with childhood.

First, a couple of questions. Who are the primary references for the vocabulary you are using here? Deleuze-Guartari? Does ‘mimetic emulation’ come from them or Rene Girard? Where does the term ‘conscientious universes’ come from?
I’m going to assume that what you wrote is mainly from DG. What I want to do is compare their thinking with an amalgam of Shaun Gallagher, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Merleau-Ponty that I will label the radicalized 4EA school of thought.
In order to simplify things initially, I am hoping that John Protevi can be used as an acceptable surrogate for DG. The reason is that Protevi is not only a dedicated adherent to Deleuzian thinking but is well versed in cognitive science and in particular Gallagher and Varela.

It seems that Protevi makes similar distinctions between 4EA and DG to your characterization of
4ea models of consciousness as “a limited and isolated phenomenological model”.
Your critique sounds harsher however. One reviewer of Protevi’s book ‘Life, War, Earth’ wrote: “As Protevi argues, a sophisticated approach to phenomenology does not see it as reducing experience to what appears to a subject but rather as proceeding from that appearance to an understanding of what must underlie it. Taken that way, Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, which seeks the conditions of real rather than possible experience, lies at not nearly as far a remove from say, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body, as many have thought.”

In Protevi’s own words:“I get to my notion of human nature as “body politic” by putting the “embodied mind” school of cognitive science together with the post-structuralist French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. What attracted me to the embodied mind school (e.g., Hubert Dreyfus, Evan Thompson, Alva Noë, and the late Francisco Varela) is the critique of the standard computer metaphor of cognition as information processing and its alternate vision of cognition as an organism directing itself in its environment. Such embodied cognition is inescapably affective; the old division of reason and emotion needs to be rethought as “affective cognition.”

“What Deleuze brings to the table is a wide-ranging materialist ontology, so that we can use the same basic concepts of self-organizing systems in both natural and social registers. This enables me to couple the “politic” to the “body,” to connect the social and the somatic. Basically, Deleuze lets us go “above” and “below” the subject; “above” to politics, and “below” to biology. We live at the crossroads: singular subjects arise from a “crystallization” or “resolution” of a distributed network of natural processes and social practices.”

I don’t know whether Protevi thinks more radically than Gallagher , Thompson and Merleau-Ponty. I just have a hunch that he is too reductionist in his thinking. While Protevi offers us a detailed comparison of DG vs 4ea, I’m aware of no similar treatment from the 4ea side toward DG-related ideas. All I can do is offers suggestions of how it might be possible for a 4ea-type thinking to answer to the critique Protevi levels against it of risking missing the ‘above’ and ‘below’ in its abstractive determination of subjectivity.

I could begin with a warning. While it sounds impressive to throw in every conceivable source of input, information, flow, both signifying and a-signifying, as possible impingments upon and definers of subjectivity, we don’t end up with anything interesting or useful except as such impingements can be seen in the light of ordering structurations and patterns. Without minimal coherence and consistency there is only pure randomness. If we are to choose a DG account of affectivity and subjectivity over other philosophies and psychologies, it must be because it is more useful to us, more clarifying and , in some overall sense, more effectively ordered, not because it offers a laundry list of infinite sources of random impingement. That large list you gave me (room, psychology, signifying and a-signifying flows, etc, etc,) is less significant in and of itself than in how it is specifically understood in its orders of relationship. We know that all these impingements jostle, form and reform subjectivity, but how do we make sure that we don’t end up reifying them such that the subject is nothing but an endless sequence of random operant conditionings? I have no problem in embracing DG in this regard as preferable to Freudian, stimulus-response and first generation cognitive models of the subject, because while at a micro level DG abandons the ordered structures and processes that define these approaches, at a metalevel it is posits a less arbitrary and less polarized model of experiential change. All that stuff coming at subjectivty from above, below and within that dissolves, ovewhelms and displaces psychodynamic id, ego and superego has a more radically intricate kind of order or logic to it that persuades us that we understand persons better through it that via Freudianism.

Protevi has spent that past few decades trying to convince us that his reading of DG gives him a method of analyzing notorious affective-socio-political situations such as Columbine that can supplement 4ea accounts. I think the details of his method give us a good opportunity to judge the usefulness of his ordering strategy, particularly with regard to affect and motivation.

I have selected what I think are pertiment passages from Protevi's 'AFFECT, AGENCY AND
RESPONSIBILITY:THE ACT OF KILLING IN THE AGE OF CYBORGS' to demonstrate how
difference operates via assemblages for him:

"The vast majority of soldiers cannot kill in cold blood and need to kill in a desubjectified state,
e.g., in reflexes, rages and panics."

"Zahavi (2005) and Gallagher (2005), among others, distinguish agency and ownership of bodily
actions. Ownership is the sense that my body is doing the action, while agency is the sense that I
am in control of the action, that the action is willed. Both are aspects of subjectivity, though they
may well be a matter of pre-reflective self-awareness rather than full-fledged
objectifying self-consciousness. But alongside subjectivity we need also to notice emergent
assemblages that skip subjectivity and directly conjoin larger groups and the somatic. To follow
this line of thought, let us accept that, in addition to non-subjective body control by reflexes, we
can treat basic emotions as modular “affect programs” (Griffiths 1997) that run the body’s
hardware in the absence of conscious control. As with reflexes, ownership and agency are only
retrospectively felt, at least in severe cases of rage in which the person “wakes up” to see the
results of the destruction committed while he or she was in the grips of the rage. In this way we
see two elements we need to take into account besides the notion of subjective agency: (1) that
there is another sense of “agent” as non-subjective controller of bodily action, either reflex or
basic emotion, and (2) that in some cases the military unit and non-subjective reflexes and basic
emotions are intertwined in such a way as to bypass the soldiers’ subjectivity qua controlled
intentional action. In these cases the practical agent of the act of killing is not the individual
person or subject, but the emergent assemblage of military unit and non-subjective reflex or
equally non-subjective “affect program.”

“A little more detail on the notion of a “rage agent” might be helpful at this point. Extreme cases
of rage produce a modular agent or “affect program” that replaces the subject. Affect programs
are emotional responses that are “complex, coordinated, and automated … unfold[ing] in this
coordinated fashion without the need for conscious direction” (Griffiths 1997: 77). They are
more than reflexes, but they are triggered well before any cortical processing can take place
(though later cortical appraisals can dampen or accelerate the affect program). Griffiths makes
the case that affect programs should be seen in light of Fodor’s notion of modularity, which calls
for a module to be “mandatory … opaque [we are aware of outputs but not the processes
producing them] … and informationally encapsulated [the information in a module cannot access
that in other modules]” (93; my comments in brackets). Perhaps second only to the question of
adaptationism for the amount of controversy it has evoked, the use of the concept of modularity
in evolutionary psychology is bitterly contested. I feel relatively safe proposing a very-widely
distributed rage module or rage agent, since its adaptive value is widely attested to by its
presence in other mammals, and since Panksepp 1998 is able to cite studies of direct electrical
stimulation of the brain (ESB) and neurochemical manipulation as identifying homologous rage
circuits in humans and other mammalian species (190)."

"In the berserker rage, the subject is overwhelmed by a chemical flood that triggers an
evolutionarily primitive module which functions as an agent which runs the body’s hardware in its place.' Protevi here isnt integrating a rage module with situational intentionality, except as the 'reflex' rage is switched on by a cognitive trigger, after which it proceeds independently of intention. He says:

"a sense of agency is absent during the rage-induced or reflex-controlled act of killing", but Protevi doesn’t seem to recognize that the lack of a conscious sense of agency does not mean that it isnt implicit.. He splits the former off from the latter. They may be loosely integrated within the
larger ecology of thought, body , social realm, but nevertheless can be talked about in 'modular'
terms. Conditioning( not Kantian but Skinnerian, or do these amount to the same thing?) is central to this relation between the cognitive trigger of a reflex rage assemblage
and its appearance.

"Soldiers are acculturated to dehumanize the enemy by a series of racial slurs.
This acculturation is especially powerful when accomplished through rhythmic chanting while
running, for such entrainment weakens personal identity to produce a group subject". This is
another example of conditioning."Desensitization is merely an enabling factor for the role of
classical and operant conditioning in modern training."

Protevi's account is dripping with this arbitrary conditioning, both of affect and cognition:
Protevi's favorite phrase seems to be 'more than reflex', but these impingements of world and
physiology on person act barely more than reflexively.


"In addition to the affective aspect of heightened desensitization, simulation training
constitutes a new cognitive group subject. The instant decision of “shoot / no shoot” is solicited
by the presence or absence of key traits in the gestalt of the situation. Such instant decisions are
more than reflexes, but operate at the very edge of the conscious awareness of the soldiers and
involve complex subpersonal processes of threat perception (Correll et al 2006). In addition to
this attenuation of individual agency, cutting-edge communication technology now allows
soldiers to network together in real time. With this networking we see an extended / distributed
cognition culminating in “topsight” for a commander who often doesn’t “command” in the sense
of micro-manage but who observes and intervenes at critical points (Arquilla and Rondfeldt
2000: 22). In other words, contemporary team-building applications through real-time
networking are a cybernetic application of video games that goes above the level of the subject
(Fletcher 1999). In affective entrainment, instant decision-making, and cognitive “topsight” the
soldiers produced by rhythmic chanting and intensive simulation training are nodes within a
cybernetic organism, the fighting group, which maintains its functional integrity and tactical
effectiveness by real-time communication technology. It’s the emergent group with the
distributed decisions of the soldiers that is the cyborg here, operating at the thresholds of the
individual subjectivities of the soldiers."

Thompson seems to argue against the way that Protevi uses affect as pre-programmed module
split off from subjectivity.
”Evidence is now accumulating that experience-dependent brain activity in particular
environmental contexts plays a huge role in the development of the individual brain.
Rather than being a collection of pre-specified modules, the brain appears to be an
organ that constructs itself in development through spontaneously generated and
experience-dependent activity (Quartz & Sejnowski, 1997; Quartz, 1999;
Karmiloff-Smith, 1998), a developmental process made possible by robust and flexible
developmental mechanisms conserved in animal evolution (Gerhart & Kirschner,
1997).”

“Douglas F. Watt (1998) describes affect as ‘a prototype “whole brain event”’, but we could go further and say that affect is a prototypical whole-organism event. Affect has numerous dimensions that bind together virtually every aspect of the organism—the psychosomatic network of the nervous system, immune system, and endocrine system; physiological changes in the autonomic nervous system, the limbic system, and the superior cortex; facial-motor changes and global differential motor readiness for approach or withdrawal; subjective experience along a pleasure–displeasure valence axis; social signalling and coupling; and conscious evaluation
and assessment (Watt, 1998). Thus the affective mind isn’t in the head, but in the whole body; and affective states are emergent in the reciprocal, co-determination sense: they arise from neural and somatic activity that itself is conditioned by the ongoing embodied awareness and action of the whole animal or person.”

Thompson addressed concerns by Provi about subjectivism in his model. “A certain tendency to privilege interiority in autopoietic discourse has always worried me. I felt that worry in writing those words in Mind in Life about the reciprocal yet asymmetrical relation between interiority and exteriority, but I did not adequately address the worry because of another argument I was trying to advance, specifically that the genuine interiority of life is a precursor to the interiority of consciousness, and hence that the conception of nature presupposed in standard formulations of the hard problem or explanatory gap for consciousness—namely, that living nature has no genuine interiority—is misguided. So the task is to see whether we can retain the crucial advance that a phenomenological reading of the theory of autopoiesis provides, while situating that advance in an enriched and more balanced account of the dynamic co-emergence and mutual entrainment of living processes and their environments.

In Donn Welton’s words: “The organism enacts an environment as the environment entrains the organism. Both are necessary and neither, by itself, is sufficient for the process of sense-making.”

“But now comes the tricky point. What we have just said implies that the relation between organism and environment is reciprocal, for each acts as a control parameter for the other. But this kind of reciprocity does not imply that their relation is not also asymmetrical, in the relevant sense of asymmetry. Although the physical and energetic coupling between a living being and the
physicochemical environment is symmetrical, with each partner exerting more influence on the
other at different times, the living being modulates the parameters of this coupling in a way the
environment typically does not. Living beings, precisely because they are autopoietic and adaptive, can “surf” environmental events and modulate them to their own ends, like a bird gliding on the wind. Interactional asymmetry is precisely this capacity to modulate the coupling with the environment. If we lose sight of this interactional asymmetry, then we lose the ability to
account for the directedness proper to living beings in their sense-making, and hence we lose the
resources we need to connect sense-making to intentionality.”

I will venture a tentative thesis at this point concerning Prtovei’s interpretation of DG vs Thompson’s 4ea. I think Protevi’s approach belongs to the larger framework of enactivism, based on his numerous analyses of Gallagher, Thompson, Merleau-Ponty and Varela. But I also suspect it represents a less sophisticated, more reductive version than that of Thompson or Gallagher, in spite of its claims to situate subjectivity within a wider realm of the bio-political.
Whereas Protevi thinks his view is wider in scope, it may simply be more fragmented, lacking the extent of integrative impetus in Thompson-Varela’s thinking. Proteiv’s reliance on dynamical systems metaphors seems to too often begin from algorithmicly-themed and internally centered machinic processes(near-reflexive affect modules, cognitive programs). Then creativity and transformation consists of the clashing, interruption and intgerating among such independent flows, machines, algorithms..

We see the same reductive tendency in Massumi to begin from self-centered algorithmic iterations which only later interaffect, resonate or disrupt each other. Whta’s lacking is a more radical thinking of interactivity. Non-linearity isn’t enough because it still operates as a deterministic metaphor.

Massumi: "Intensity is beside that loop, a nonconscious, never-to-be-conscious autonomic
remainder. It is outside expectation and adaptation, as disconnected from meaningful sequencing,
from narration, as it is from vital function. It is narratively de-localized, spreading over the
generalized body surface, like a lateral backwash from the function-meaning interloops traveling
the vertical path between head and heart.
When on the other hand language doubles a sequence of movements in order to add
something to it in the way of meaningful progression – in this case a sense of futurity,
expectation, an intimation of what comes next in a conventional progression – then it runs
counter to and dampens the intensity. "

Massumi: "Intensity would seem to be associated with nonlinear processes: resonation and
feedback which momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to
future." Non-linearity and feedback work to relate disparate contents. "Every event takes place on both levels – and between both levels, as they resonate together to form a larger system composed of two interacting subsystems following entirely different rules of formation.
Affect or intensity in the present account is akin to what is called a critical point, or a bifurcation
point, or singular point, in chaos theory and the theory of dissipative structures. This is the
turning point at which a physical system paradoxically embodies multiple and normally mutually
exclusive potentials, only one of which is “selected.” “Phase space” could be seen as a
diagrammatic rendering of the dimension of the virtual. The organization of multiple levels that
have different logics and temporal organizations but are locked in resonance with each other and
recapitulate the same event in divergent ways, recalls the fractal ontology and nonlinear causality
underlying theories of complexity. "

"For structure is the place where nothing ever happens, that explanatory heaven in
which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a self-consistent set of invariant generative
rules." "Nothing is prefigured in the event. It is the collapse of structured distinction into
intensity, of rules into paradox. a tinge of the unexpected, the lateral, the unmotivated, to lines of
action and reaction. A change in the rules. The expression-event is the system of the
inexplicable..."

Note here that beginning from system as logical procedure creates a sharp oppositionality between structure and change, rule and paradox, the cognitive and the affective.

I love "Dialectic of Enlightenment".
"I would prefer to come back to your model of counscessness, and during this discussion I would lay out my understanding."

We can discuss my model of consciousness. In order to frame that discussion, I would like to set up a dichotomy and see what you think of it. On the one side would be discourses which follow upon Hegel-Marx. These would include Adorno, Habermas, Badiou, Jameson, Althusser and Zizek. On the other would be post-structuralists such as Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard and Nancy. I'm not saying that this dichotomy I want to set up is entirely faithful to all the differences within and between these groups. I just would like to know what you think of it.

While there is a shared interest uniting the Marxist and poststructurlist thinkers regarding the need to subvert representational norms, ideologies, network of significations, what would unite the Marxist group is the use of a dialectics(negative for Marx and Adorno, affirmative for Badiou) that thinks history in terms of an emancipatory telos. That is to say , while they reject an enlightenment notion of progress, they maintain a certain messianism in their faith in radical progressive political becoming. This marks the modernist element in their thinking.

The post-structuralists, in contrast, make the postmodern philosophical move of putting into question the justification of any notion of emancipation. They read Nietzsche as determining a trajectory of emancipation as originating in a Will to emancipation, which must be subordinate to Will to Power, which has no emancipatory or any other telos. The only trajectory of Will to Power is difference. For them , political history is not diaelctically emancipatory but incimmensurably geneological.

Merleau-Ponty had been claimed by both the dialectical and the postmodern camps. I prefer to read him as postmodern. The philosophy of mind-cognitive sicence community that is elaborating enactive, embodied, embedded, extended affective auto-poeitic accounts includes both modernist and postmodernist writers. I prefer to read Gallagher as postmodern post-emancipatory.

I think its important to recognize a distinction between what a writer like Deleuze is trying to do
and what radical post-marxist emanciaptory thinkers like Zizek and Badiou are aiming at.

"Do you think that when Nietzsche literally went mad he became the overman? Could one who is literally chaos and confusion create works of philosophy?"

I think Nietzsche is using madness as a metaphor for that thinking which opposes itself to "the universality and the universal binding force of a faith; in sum, the non-arbitrary character of judgments." The madness in Will to Power is its shattering of faith in non-arbitrariness as the grounding of truth, its embrace of logical and inferential incommensurability between successive value structures.

The question I have for you is , if Nietzsche's objection to metaphysics is its attachment to Platonism, then which modern philosophical traditions qualify as Platonic? I think you and I can agree that Kantian and Hegelian Idealism fit the bill, as well as Husserl's transcendental ego. But what about Kierkegaard? Gadamerian hermeneutics? Are Marxist and Frankfurt school accounts Platonic(Adorno? Feuerbach,?Habermas?)?

IWhen Shaun Gallagher says :“Radical or deconstructive hermeneutics [Heidegger, Derrida , Foucault] , following Nietzsche, would argue that the only truth is untruth, that all interpretations are false, that there is no ultimate escape from false consciousness, that the whole metaphysical concept of truth requires deconstruction", is he describing Nietzsche's response to Platonism?.

You say part of science is correspondence to a real world. Isn't the correspondence theory of truth a Platonism, truth as the mirror of nature, according to Rorty?

"Much of day to day science is not theoretical but practical."

What does that mean? Doesnt the practical orient itself in relation to interpretive accounts of meaning? Don't all facts presuppose valuations that frame them? Don't most scientists today still operate under Kantiann assumptions concerning the nature of objectivty as subjective constructions attempting to correspond to what is out there? And scientific progress via Popperian falisfication?
Wouldn't Nietzsche argue that most contemporary scientists still are beholden to this platonism, regardless of how 'practical' their focus is?

My key question for you is , do you think Nietzsche was a radical relativist? Are all aims of reaching the social good, the moral, of progress, not only unattainable but ultimately incoherent for Nietzsche? Even for the individual , isn't the notion of the good relative to value structure, and as the value- positing Will to Power overcomes itself in eternally, what one wants and achieves via a valuative structure is incommenusrable with what one finds oneself wanting and beleivding in the next valuative positing?

Every philosopher in the world acknowledges Plato. You may as well acknowledge water, for all it helps this discussion.

" Self-overcoming is universal and applies to all living things. Both value and nihilism are universal and apply to all men, not just Western man or the metaphysical tradition."

I'm not talking about what applies to all men, I'm talking about Nietzsche's quarrel with Western philosophy since the Greeks and up through the metaphysics of Kant, Hegel, and Schopernauer. He also has a problem with eastern ascetic traditions, and the valuative systems of socialist atheism. Some of these metaphysical approaches specifically posit self-overcoming(Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, for example). What is Nietzsche's critique of Hegelian and Marxist self-overcoming? How is Nietzsche's understanding of negation, opposition, absence and nihilism different from theirs?

"I said nothing about a developmental trajectory. The third metamorphosis is the child, a forgetting, a new beginning. That is not a developmental trajectory. What I did say is that it must always be in the service of life, the revaluation of values always takes play within an environment."

Two sets of questions: 1)Do you see the history of science as developmental trajectory , as do Popper and Kuhn, in different ways? I don't mean a linear , cumulative progress, but simply the replacement of one paradigm with another that in some central, pragmatic way can be said to be better than the previous in terms of parsimony, predictiveness, comprehensiveness, or other empirical standard (or as Popper would argue, a better approximation of the real world). Is the aim of science the correspondence of our theoretical representations with a real world? Is there a dialectical movement to ideas?

2)Are you making a distinction between the trajectory of the history of science
and Nietzschean metamorphosis of values? If this metamorphosis is ,as you say, 'in the service of life, the revaluation of values always takes play within an environment', is this revaluation a move toward 'better' values in the sense of being more adaptive to an environment?

"As I see it, this has nothing to do with the overcoming of metaphysics. The goal, now as forever, is to create values that promote health, strength, and life. To the extent that it could be seen as an overcoming of metaphysics, it is the overcoming of Platonism."
It is also the overcoming of truth as a superior value to falsity, and the overcoming of the idea of life as adaptation to an environment.

Does Platonism include the Kuhnian philosophy of science that says that science evolves through revolutions, via the overthrow of extant paradigms by new ones?

Nietzsche wrote:"Our faith in science is still based on a metaphysical faith, – even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire from the blaze set alight by a
faith thousands of years old, that faith of the Christians, which was also
Plato’s faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine."

"Plato's Socrates calls philosophy divine madness, but such madness is not the same as Nietzsche's madness caused by syphilis or some other medical illness. I suspect this has something to do with
Dionysus."

I think it has to do with the Overman's world being that of "mad chaos of confusion and desire".

"Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this lightning, he is this madness! ”

Metaphysicians believe "things of the highest value must have another, separate origin of their own, – they cannot be derived from this ephemeral, seductive, deceptive, lowly world, from this mad chaos of confusion and desire. Look instead to the lap of being, the everlasting, the hidden God, the ‘thing-in-itself ’ – this is where their ground must be, and nowhere else!” – This way of judging typifies the prejudices by which metaphysicians of all ages can be recognized: this type of valuation lies behind
all their logical procedures. From these “beliefs” they try to acquire their “knowledge,” to acquire something that will end up being solemnly christened as “the truth.” The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is the belief in oppositions of values. It has not occurred to even the most
cautious of them to start doubting right here at the threshold, where it is actually needed the most – even though they had vowed to themselves “deomnibus dubitandum.” But we can doubt, first, whether opposites even exist and, second, whether the popular valuations and value oppositions
that have earned the metaphysicians’ seal of approval might not only be foreground appraisals."

Nietzsche says the opposite of madness is metaphysics:

"The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity and still hovers over it is the eruption of madness – which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind’s lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason. Not truth and certainty are the opposite of the world of the madman, but the universality and the universal binding force of a faith; in sum, the
non-arbitrary character of judgments. We others are the exception and the danger – and we need eternally to be defended."

You're going to quote Adorno against Heidegger? Oh dear.
I'm afraid we'll have to take a few steps back from Heidegger then. I don't think we're quite ready for him.
If you really endorse Adorno's reading of Heidegger you've got a got of a conflict on your hands. Because you cannot at the same time read Hedeigger this way, and think of Derrida's work as a 'negative theology"(where did you read this?), while approvingly quoting Deleuze without running the risk of misinterpreting Deleuze. Why do I say this?
Let's look at the alignments.Deleuze never wrote about Heidegger, but we know Derrida is very close to Heidegger. We also know that Derrida wrote he didnt find anything objectionalble in deleuze's ideas. We also know that a community of post-structuralists including Foucault, Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Lyotard and Derrida were united in their reading of Nietzsche against
existentialist interpretations of him. We also know that Nancy talked of his close proximity in thinking to both Derrida and Deleuze, and his debt to Heideger as another post-Nietzschean thinker. My assumption is that neither Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard or Nancy would agree with Adorno's Kierkegaardian reading of Heidegger. Furthermore, the post-structuralists were united in rejecting Adorno's Hegelian emancipatory thinking, and none of them would likely refer to Derida's approach as negative theology.

So maybe you've been reading Deleuze through Adorno.


Let's talk about Adorno. . Have you found his writing to be particularly useful to you?
What do you think about his orienting of living in an emancipatory direction? Do you see any imcompatability between his dialectical teleology and Deleuze's Nietzschean notion of becoming? From my reading, by the latter part of Deleuze's career he had finally succeeded in ridding his thinking of the vestiges of marxist and psychoanalytic doctrine.
Concerning time as duration, may be you could talk a little about how you understand Deleuze's concept of duration. Do you see it as similar to Bergson's?

I love this interpretation. Deleuze understands Nietzsche like few others.

"In my opinion if we are to understand a philosopher we must do so first and foremost in his own terms and not those of Heidegger or anyone else. It is only from this vantage point that we can evaluate his place within the context of someone else's work."
The summary of Will to Power and Nihilism that Heidegger wrote, and that I mentioned above, was Heidegger's attempt to understand Nietzsche in his own terms. Only later in the piece does Heidegger then introduce his critique of Nietzsche. It is impossible to represent any author's intentions without filtering those intentions through one's own interpretation. The reason I included it is because I agree with it completely , so it is not just Heidegger's attempt to read Nietzsche faithfully ,it is also mine.

As far as Heidegger's critique of Will to Power, for Heidegger Nietzsche is the last metaphysician because he determines truth in relation to the establishment of value-scheme. Heidegger argues that beginning from schematism and its overcoming is starting too late. Starting from beings as value-structures turns Will to Power itself into a value, the highest value. What Nietzsche fails to do is think from WITHIN, that is , AS the supposed self-presencing lingering of the schematism. The fore-structuring gesture of transcendence is not what goes beyond schematism, or before it as its condition of possibility, but what is 'built into' it, what happens IN the 'is', AS the 'is.https://www.academia.edu/38288335/Heidegger_Will_to_Power_and_Gestell

("As I can see for Nietzsche man makes history". Sometime you and I should talk about how you think Heidegger understands Being in relation to history and temporality)

There are plenty of writers who don't agree with Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche, but let's talk about those who agree with his(and my) summary of Nietzschean nihilism.
Because everyone reads Nietzsche through their own lens, there are distinct camps of Nietzsche readers.
The camp that coalesces around the interpretation I put forth include the French post-structuralists (Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, Nancy), William Connolly, Protevi, among others.
Opposing them is a community of Nietzscheans(including kauffman) who see him within an existential orbit. I'm getting the sense you are reading him this way.

I think the difference between these groups comes down to this. The existentialist interpreters think the movement from one paradigm or valuative system to the next as a kind of Kuhnian non-linear dialectical development, a pragmatic construction, dismantlement and reconstruction of schemes of understanding for the purpose of adaptively making sense of the world. They don't necessary believe in metanarratives, but still hold onto truth as a primary value.
The hermeneutic philosopher and psychologist Shaun Gallagher depicts the post-structuralist Nietzscheans:
“Radical or deconstructive hermeneutics [Heidegger, Derrida , Foucault] , following Nietzsche, would argue that the only truth is untruth, that all interpretations are false, that there is no ultimate escape from false consciousness, that the whole metaphysical concept of truth requires deconstruction. Gadamer contends that in following Nietzsche’s radical venture both Heidegger and Derrida have been led away from the primary aspect of language:conversation.”

Getting back to your Zarathustra passage, "the man on the tightrope has rejected what was but has not reached the other side", my guess is from your reading, 'the other side', the 'yes' is a new valuation to replace the old discarded one, along a developmental trajectory.

For the poststructuralists, by contrast, the 'other side' is not a new valuation to join an endless series of prior and future valuations, but revaluation of the whole motivation (search for truth, the real, the good) behind the construction and replacement of paradigms. Not desire for a better and truer explanation, but celebration of the act of value positing itself for its own sake, without aim or development. The overman on the far side of the abyss of metaphysical nihilism is salvation as madness.

"If you mean that nihilism is not the absence of value then I do not agree."
Nihilism would have to do with loss or destruction of value, meaning , truth, understood in some way or other. But Nietzsche defines nihilism in different ways. According to Nietzsche, nihilism is understood according to Western metaphysics as the loss of faith in the meaning of traditional values like truth, morality, progress, etc. But coupled with this perceived loss is the continued holding onto the importance of these values, so this sort of nihilism is a mourning based on the maintaining of the metaphysical structure that made these values desirable in the first place.“The philosophical nihilist is convinced that all that happens is meaningless and in vain; and that there ought not to be anything meaningless and in vain.”

Nietzsche opposes this orientation toward values to his Will to Power, which doesn't simply abandon the possibility of finding meaning in truth, progress, morality, God, but no longer finds it desirable to wish for such things. Will to Power celebrates what traditional metaphysics held to be nihilistic, the mere positing of values which in and of themselves are not true or moral or progressive, which are celebrations of plurality and difference and contingency and decadence as well as power. So there is a moment of nihilism in Will to Power but it is not a falling away from what is critical to life. Nietzsche says , "Nihilism as a normal phenomenon can be a symptom of increasing strength. Partly, because the strength to create, to will, has so increased that it no longer requires these total interpretations and introductions of meaning ("present tasks," the state, etc.)." "Nihilism" an ideal of the highest degree of powerfulness of spirit, the over-richest life--partly destructive, partly ironic."

"And do you know what "the world" is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This
world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude
of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only
transforms itself; this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally
self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my "beyond
good and evil," without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without
will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself--do you want a name for this
world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed,
strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?-- This world is the will to
power--and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power--and
nothing besides!"

I added the first few pages of Nietzsche's discussion of nihilism from Will to Power. It seems to me that Heidegger did a good job of summarizing its content.

WILL TO POWER

1. Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests? Point of
departure: it is an error to consider "social distress" or "physiological
degeneration" or, worse, corruption, as the cause of nihilism. Ours is the most
decent and compassionate age. Distress, whether of the soul, body, or intellect,
cannot of itself give birth to nihilism (i.e., the radical repudiation of value,
meaning, and desirability). Such distress always permits a variety of
interpretations. Rather: it is in one particular interpretation, the Christian-moral
one, that nihilism is rooted.

2. The end of Christianity--at the hands of its own morality (which cannot be
replaced), which turns against the Christian God (the sense of truthfulness,
developed highly by Christianity, is nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness
of all Christian interpretations of the world and of history; rebound from "God is
truth" to the fanatical faith "All is false"; Buddhism of action).


3. Skepticism regarding morality is what is decisive. The end of the moral
interpretation of the world, which no longer has any sanction after it has tried to
escape into some beyond, leads to nihilism. "Everything lacks meaning" (the
untenability of one interpretation of the world, upon which a tremendous amount of
energy has been lavished, awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of the
world are false). Buddhistic tendency, yearning for Nothing. (Indian Buddhism is not
the culmination of a thoroughly moralistic development; its nihilism is therefore
full of morality that is not overcome: existence as punishment, existence construed
as error, error thus as a punishment--a moral valuation.) Philosophical attempts to
overcome the "moral God" (Hegel, pantheism). Overcoming popular ideals: the sage;
the saint; the poet. The antagonism of "true" and "beautiful" and "good".

4. Against "meaninglessness" on the one hand, against moral value judgments on the
other: to what extent has all science and philosophy so far been influenced by moral
judgments? and won't this net us the hostility of science? Or an antiscientific
mentality? Critique of Spinozism. Residues of Christian value judgments are found
everywhere in socialistic and positivistic systems. A critique of Christian morality
is still lacking

5. The nihilistic consequences of contemporary natural science (together with its
attempts to escape into some beyond). The industry of its pursuit eventually leads
to self-disintegration, opposition, an antiscientific mentality. Since Copernicus
man has been rolling from the center toward X.*

6. The nihilistic consequences of the ways of thinking in politics and economics,
where all "principles" are practically histrionic: the air of mediocrity,
wretchedness, dishonesty, etc. Nationalism. Anarchism, etc. Punishment. The
redeeming class and human being are lacking--the justifiers.

7. The nihilistic consequences of historiography and of the "practical historians,"
i.e., the romantics. The position of art: its position in the modern world
absolutely lacking in originality. Its decline into gloom. Goethe's allegedly
Olympian stance.

8. Art and the preparation of nihilism: romanticism (the conclusion of Wagner's
Nibelungen).



What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is
lacking; "why?" finds no answer.


Radical nihilism is the conviction of an absolute untenability of existence when it
comes to the highest values one recognizes; plus the realization that we lack the
least right to posit a beyond or an in-itself of things that might be "divine" or
morality incarnate.
This realization is a consequence of the cultivation of "truthfulness"--thus itself
a consequence of the faith in morality.


What were the advantages of the Christian moral hypothesis?
1. It granted man an absolute value, as opposed to his smallness and accidental
occurrence in the flux of becoming and passing away.
2. It served the advocates of God insofar as it conceded to the world, in spite of
suffering and evil, the character of perfection-including "freedom": evil appeared full of meaning.
3. It posited that man had a knowledge of absolute values and thus adequate
knowledge precisely regarding what is most important.
4. It prevented man from despising himself as man, from taking sides against life;
from despairing of knowledge: it was a means of preservation.
In sum: morality was the great antidote against practical and theoretical nihilism.

But among the forces cultivated by morality was truthfulness: this eventually turned
against morality, discovered its teleology, its partial perspective--and now the
recognition of this inveterate mendaciousness that one despairs of shedding becomes
a stimulant. Now we discover in ourselves needs implanted by centuries of moral
interpretation--needs that now appear to us as needs for untruth; on the other hand,
the value for which we endure life seems to hinge on these needs. This
antagonism--not to esteem what we know, and not to be allowed any longer to esteem
the lies we should like to tell ourselves--results in a process of dissolution.

This is the antinomy:
Insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on existence.

The supreme values in whose service man should live, especially when they were very
hard on him and exacted a high puce--these social values were erected over man to
strengthen their voice, as if they were commands of God, as 'reality," as the true"
world, as a hope and future world. Now that the shabby origin of these values is
becoming clear, the universe seems to have lost value, seems "meaningless"--but that
is only a transitional stage.

The nihilistic consequence (the belief in valuelessness) as a consequence of moral
valuation: everything egoistic has come to disgust us (even though we realize the
impossibility of the unegoistic); what is necessary has come to disgust us (even
though we realize the impossibility of any liberum arbitrium or intelligible
freedom"). We see that we cannot reach the sphere in which we have placed our
values; but this does not by any means confer any value on that other sphere in
which we live: on the contrary, we are weary because we have lost the main stimulus
"In vain so far!"

Pessimism as a preliminary form of nihilism.

Pessimism as strength--in what? in the energy of its logic, as anarchism and
nihilism, as analytic.
Pessimism as decline--in what? as growing effeteness, as a sort of cosmopolitan
fingering, as "tout comprendre and historicism.
The critical tension: the extremes appear and become predominant.

The logic of pessimism down to ultimate nihilism: what is at work in it? The idea of
valuelessness, meaninglessness: to what extent moral valuations hide behind all
other high values.
Conclusion: Moral value judgments are ways of passing sentence, negations; morality
is a way of turning one's back on the will to existence.
Problem: But what is morality?

Nihilism as a psychological state will have to be reached, first, when we have
sought a "meaning" in all events that is not there: so the seeker eventually becomes
discouraged. Nihilism, then, is the recognition of the long waste of strength, the
agony of the "in vain," insecurity, the lack of any opportunity to recover and to
regain composure--being ashamed in front of oneself, as if one had deceived oneself
all too long.--This meaning could have been: the "fulfillment" of some highest
ethical canon in all events, the moral world order; or the growth of love and
harmony in the intercourse of beings; or the gradual approximation of a state of
universal happiness; or even the development toward a state of universal
annihilation--any goal at least constitutes some meaning. What all these notions
have in common is that something is to be achieved through the process--and now one
realizes that becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing.-- Thus, disappointment
regarding an alleged aim of becoming as a cause of nihilism: whether regarding a
specific aim or, universalized, the realization that all previous hypotheses about
aims that concern the whole "evolution" are inadequate (man no longer the
collaborator, let alone the center, of becoming).

Nihilism as a psychological state is reached, secondly, when one has posited a
totality, a systematization, indeed any organization in all events, and underneath
all events, and a soul that longs to admire and revere has wallowed in the idea of
some supreme form of domination and administration (--if the soul be that of a
logician, complete consistency and real dialectic are quite sufficient to reconcile
it to everything). Some sort of unity, some form of "monism": this faith suffices to
give man a deep feeling of standing in the context of, and being dependent on, some
whole that is infinitely superior to him, and he sees himself as a mode of the
deity.--"The well-being of the universal demands the devotion of the
individual"--but behold, there is no such universal! At bottom, man has lost the
faith in his own value when no infinitely valuable whole works through him; i.e., he
conceived such a whole in order to be able to believe in his own value.
Nihilism as psychological state has yet a third and last form.

Given these two insights, that becoming has no goal and that underneath all becoming
there is no grand unity in which the individual could immerse himself completely as
in an element of supreme value, an escape remains: to pass sentence on this whole
world of becoming as a deception and to invent a world beyond it, a true world. But
as soon as man finds out how that world is fabricated solely from psychological
needs, and how he has absolutely no right to it, the last form of nihilism comes
into being: it includes disbelief in any metaphysical world and forbids itself any
belief in a true world. Having reached this standpoint, one grants the reality of
becoming as the only reality, forbids oneself every kind of clandestine access to
afterworlds and false divinities--but cannot endure this world though one does not
want to deny it.

What has happened, at bottom? The feeling of valuelessness was reached with the
realization that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted by means
of the concept of "aim," the concept of "unity," or the concept of "truth."
Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is
lacking: the character of existence is not "true," is false. One simply lacks any
reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world. Briefly: the categories
"aim," "unity," "being" which we used to project some value into the world--we pull
out again; so the world looks valueless.

Suppose we realize how the world may no longer be interpreted in terms of these
three categories, and that the world begins to become valueless for us after this
insight: then we have to ask about the sources of our faith in these three
categories. Let us try if it is not possible to give up our faith in them. Once we
have devaluated these three categories, the demonstration that they cannot be
applied to the universe is no longer any reason for devaluating the universe.
Conclusion: The faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism. We have
measured the value of the world according to categories that refer to a purely
fictitious world.

Final conclusion: All the values by means of which we have tried so far to render
the world estimable for ourselves and which then proved inapplicable and therefore
devaluated the world--all these values are, psychologically considered, the results
of certain perspectives of utility, designed to maintain and increase human
constructs of domination--and they have been falsely projected into the essence of
things. What we find here is still the hyperbolic naivete of man: positing himself
as the meaning and measure of the value of things.


Nihilism represents a pathological transitional stage (what is pathological is the
tremendous generalization, the inference that there is no meaning at all): whether
the productive forces are not yet strong enough, or whether decadence still
hesitates and has not yet invented its remedies.
Presupposition of this hypothesis: that there is no truth, that there is no absolute
nature of things nor a "thing-in-itself." This, too, IS merely nihilism--even the
most extreme nihilism. It places the value of things precisely in the lack of any
reality corresponding to these values and in their being merely a symptom of
strength on the part of the value-positers, a simplification for the sake of life.

Values and their changes are related to increases in the power of those positing the
values.
The measure of unbelief, of permitted "freedom of the spirit" as an expression of an
increase in power.
"Nihilism" an ideal of the highest degree of powerfulness of spirit, the
over-richest life--partly destructive, partly ironic.

If we were to think the movement from one paradigm or valuative system to the next as a kind of Kuhnian non-linear development, that would keep our thinking within a dialectical teleology, the consummation of Western metaphysics. Talk of obsolescence and golden ages also remain with the old thinking if they imply better and worse valuative schemes.
For Nietzsche what is 'better' about Will to Power as Principle of Principles, and what allows it to overcome metaphysics, is that it is not itself a valuative scheme, but the self-displacing impetus within all valuative schemes. Human history as the replacement of one value system by another is not any kind of progression. It doesn't go anywhere. It is the eternal return of the same self-overcoming, not bringing us closer to some final destination.

Nihilism for Nietzsche isn't simply the absence of values, it's the concept of valuation itself understood through the metaphysical tradition of the West. And the overcoming of Nihilism isnt the replacement of older values with higher values. That would be to remain within the bounds of the historical tradition of nihilism. Heidegger says

"Nietzsche himself interprets the course of Western history metaphysically, and indeed as the rise and
development of nihilism. In a note from the year 1887 Nietzsche poses the question,
"What does nihilism mean?" (Will to Power, Aph. 2). He answers: "That the highest values are devaluing themselves."
“For Nietzsche nihilism is not in any way simply a phenomenon of decay ; rather nihilism is, as the fundamental event of Western history, simultaneously and above all the intrinsic law of that
history. The "revaluing of all previous values" does indeed belong to complete,consummated, and therefore classical nihilism, but the revaluing does not merely replace the old values with new. Revaluing becomes the overturning of the nature and manner of valuing. The positing of
values requires a new principle, i.e., a new principle from which it may proceed and within which it may maintain itself. The positing of values requires another realm. The principle can no
longer be the world of the suprasensory become lifeless. Therefore nihilism, aiming at a revaluing understood in this way, will seek out what is most alive. Nihilism itself is thus transformed
into "the ideal of superabundant life" (The Word of Nietzsche:" God Is Dead")

There are many who would argue that Sartre, Kierkegaard and Gadamer said similar things. Is Heidegger more radical than these writers, and if so, how? What does he have to offer, either affirmatively or critically, to postmodern political discourses of otherness and incommensurability informing campus radicalism? What would you say to those who celebrate Heidegger for the very traits you wrote about above but oppose themselves to many of the ideas intrinsic to a Delezian-Nietzschean-Focuaultian post-truth project?

No commotion, I'm just bored. Its a cold, grey late February here in Chicago, and parsing barely penetrable passages from Heidegger seemed like a useful diversion.
Heidegger, along with Derrida, is a very important thinker for me, though.
My reading of him is not widely shared. As I mentioned, there are a large group of theologically inclined writers who embrace him into the Kierkegaard-Levinas fold(Gadamer too). This , to me, misses everything radical in Heidegger. I'm not theologically inclined and I find Nietzsche a useful bulldog to shatere the ability of any philophical talk of good Will or God or any valuative approach in a prioritizing way, even the bliss of nothingness. Using Nietzsche (and Deleuze, Nancy, Lyotard) this way unravels the basis of most readings of Heidegger. Heidegger can be used to question the remnants of metaphysical thinking on Nietzsche and Deleuze also.

As I read it, the problem is the traditional western philosophical thinking about grounds and ends which argues that truth must originate in something unchanging.
The abyss for Nietzsche is a necessary and equal part of the process of meaning as Will. Will is a self-overcoming which implies both presence and absence, ground and abyss.The rope doesn't escape from the abyss. As a bridge it implies and include abyss as necessary to what Will to Power is.

Where does choice, preference come from? Do we choose to choose? Do we choose what we desire? Or does desire choose for us before we consciously choose?
Many would say we 'find ourselves' choosing.

i want to go back to the core of your argument. Let's start with your definition of empathy. You said 'we are biologically hardwired for empathy, it cannot be "discarded"(this is a philsophical position, by the way).
That proposition is highly debated in psychological research , and more importantly, even for those who believe that there is such a thing as hard wired empathy, the question is, what exactly is it that is inherited? Is it merely a 'feeling', a 'sentiment'? Current research in mirror neurons focuses not on emotion but on the ability to recognize the other's behavior as similar to one's own. I've written a lot about emotion, and my definition of empathy would see it as necessarily beginning from a cognitive appraisal that recognizes something identifiable, relatable, familiar , in the other. Can this appraisal be wrong or fatally superficial? Of course. This is where your critique is useful. Empathy begins as an incipient appraisal, a beginning, sketchy hypothesis. It is no different than an initial judgment or perception in any other domain. It is only the beginning of a process of unfolding a more and more nuanced and complex picture of situations with others.

Whether one's motive is to empathize or to condemn, it will always be an endless process to construct a full understanding of any subject matter. You critique of empathy really comes down to a critique of relying on one's gut, one's first impression, one's initial hypothesis without adequately exposing oneself to the particulars . Seeing empathy as a special category or device or supposed hard-wired module is beside the point . The blame for our prejudices and biases comes down to the weaknesses of human pattern-forming. How do we know when we've got it right?

You have set up a dichotomy between imagination, theory and sentiment on the one hand and 'facts' on the other. You wrote "It's important to deal only with the facts, not be too confident in our assumptions and confirm our beliefs. I will try to stick to the facts." Your imagination-sentiment vs fact binary is a bit problematic. This is where philosophy comes into play(when I said your were spouting philosophy, I meant you were asserting a philosophical position without knowing it. ). It is now understood that interpretive valuation and empirical fact are inextricably dependent on each other. A fact implies a grounding scheme of interpretation to make sense of it, or to even allow it to be seen as a fact in the first place. Knowing this doesn't radically change your argument, but it allows us to appreciate that the difference between a starting hypothesis-sentiment and getting the 'facts' is a matter of degree rather than of kind. Deterministic causality is itself a theory, that is , it is framed by valuative presuppositions, so rooting someones behavior in a causal chain does not get us to the irreducible bed rock 'fact' of the matter.

It's necessary to constantly test and question one's imaginative hypotheses against what one is observing in front of one, but If you think you've gotten to the bottom of the matter via causal facts you're less farther along than you think compared to the person who forms their view on their initial 'empathetic' or condemnatory impulse. In understanding our world , it's sentiment and hypothesis and imagination all the way down, just a matter of how how adaptive , flexible and explanatory we can manage to build our constructions of each other. The others will tell us when we're on the right track.

I agree with you that imagination and theory divorced from a thoroughgoing questioning of, and interaction with, the person or group one is theorizing about empathetically will give one an impoverished picture of who they are. What theory and imagination will do is provide one with a method of approach to forming hypotheses and testing those hypotheses . it will guide one toward how to question, what to look for, how to interpret, how rigidly to hold an interpretation, whether pure facts exist, etc. In fact, i would argue that one's methodological framework is the most important element in dealing insightfully with others.
One could say that philosophical method can be the antidote to the dangers of empathy.
A philosophical method is essentially what you've offered here. You've told us to consider insight gained from empathetic feeling and canned theory to be inadequate by itself. You 've told us to engage in thoroughgoing manner with the person you are attempting to relate to.
You've told us to look for causal sequence when we can, to attempt to arrive at facts, to not settle for categories in place of particulars.

Everything you've laid out is consonant with the philosophical underpinnings of modern scientific method, but not consonant with much of medieval or classical thinking about the methods of arriving at truth.

This is a philosophy forum, and you're spouting philosophy in order to argue against the use of overarching generalities and categories and worldview in order to attempt to understand the specificity of individuals. but what is utterly lacking in your account , ironically, is any apparent familiarity with those philosophical positions which tear apart the attempt to use overarching concepts and generalities to understand people. For instance, phenomenology , deconstruction, poststructuralism, pragmatism, hermeneutics, Heideggerian Being-with, enactive affect embodied cognitive psychology all find a way to follow individuals in their uniqueness and particularity while at the same time finding both what lends an individual's life continuity from one moment to the next and also what links that individual to larger communities, not in terms of imposed categories and overarching concepts , but in terms of dynamic interactions and intersubjectivities. In fact, I would argue that it is those philosophical approaches which do the best job of grasping the individual in terms of their utter particularity that are the most effective at being able to relate to others' lives and concerns and viewpoints. Your approach, on the other hand , ossifies differences into hermetically sealed off boxes (their biology is different!).
"Words are just arguments and sentiments expressed by people affected by nature'nurture influences. "
Tell me, which philosophical positions are you drawing from? Which writers have influenced you most?From which model of personality are you getting your idea of the unpredictablity of
human behavior? Do you identify with a pschoanalytic id-ego-supergo-unconscious psychic structure? IS the mind a stimulus-response machine conditiond by environmental stimulus contingencies? Is behavior mostly dictated by instinctive drives and dispositions shaped by biological evolution? I mention these approaches because they posit the individual as arbitrarily pushed and pulled by environment and biology, which seems to jibe with your arguments.
You should know , however, that there are richer , more insightful accounts of personality than these that may help you to see inter-relationality where you are now only able to see arbitrariness and categorical separation.

Emotion is no more under one's control than willing. We dont choose to will, we find ourselves willing. Desire comes before choosing what to desire.

Feeling is thinking itself. To avoid feeling is to avoid meaning. all experieinces are affective comportments toward the world. To understand anything is for it to matter to us in a certain way, be significant, relevant.even the most seemingly feeling-neutral attitude toward the world is still infused with feeling.

z' I think worldviews are products of the real differences which are biological and interpretative and these manifest themselves differently in different contexts and lead to different kinds of difficulties in understanding others."

I think, like may people in the world, you have difficulty stepping into the shoes of someone else and seeing the world from their perspective. What will compound your difficulty is that you apparently have convinced yourself that the problem is not in the limits of your own thinking but in some supposed structural features of humanity, such as biological differences(whatever that's supposed to mean). Yes, of course individuals' behavior manifests itself s differently in different contexts. That's precisely the point. The advantage of powerful philosophical and psychological worldviews is that they are able to
transcend what appears to you to be hopelessly different manifestations in different contexts.
The problem isn't in the world , its in your inability to construct a more effective, flexible and comprehensive scheme of interpersonal undestanding .

Sounds like Gadamerian hermeneutics to me.

There are those who may talk about scientific understanding of the world as as progressing ,and also technology as progressing,. but when it comes to inter-human understanding they may say that there is no essential progress, that human nature does not change. i wonder if you are among that group. Then there are those who recognize that scientific and technological change is part of larger cultural movements that include the arts, politics and philosophy. And they will say the reason is that all areas of cultural understanding have to be treated holistically is that any kind of understanding with regard to the particular circumstances of other human beings makes reference to larger worldviews that inform interpretations of particular events and circumstances.
You example of misreadings concerning Russians is an example of this. a better one would be the schism in the u.S. between conservatives and liberals. Their inability to empathize with one another is the result of their inability to understand from the others perspective the underlying worldview that justifies their political view point. In your every day dealings with other people, especially your family and friends, the most significant conflicts that develop and make empathy difficult arise out of differences in worldivew, not the particular events that spark one's anger, disappointment or disapproval. Trivial events are only able to spark a lack of empathy because they are informed by larger schemes of understanding on the part of others that we are not able to subsume within our own perspective. That's why its ludicrous to say we should empathize with those who despise or think are evil. The very fact that we despise them is the result of an ability to subsume their worldview, And empathy cannot be achieved into we do that. But the history of in p[philosophical and cultural worldviews is a history of the increasing ability to identity with and subsume what had formerly been seen as alien thinking on the part of other peoples.

"How could one present “present”? When we write or say something about our current present, we must think of the time of the occurrence of our sentences, which is our present time. This present time cannot be grasped as such: it is not yet or no longer present. It is always too soon or too late to grasp the presentation itself and present it. Such is the specific and paradoxical constitution of the event."

Heidegger does a good job of explaining this. Each of the steps you mention, bringing something into view as something new, having it present, presenting it, grasping it, identifying it, using and referring to it, these are all further articulations which do refer back to that which they articulate , but in articulating further they subtly change what they articulate , by bringing out something new about it. This isn't a problem for us because such steps are experienced as dealing with, examining, having, pointing to, positing something present. Each transforms what it deals with in its own way, as bringing it into view in THIS or THAT manner.

I've begun reading Deleuze again. I assume that is who you are quoting along with Massumi.
Deleuze starts his philsophy from structures, forms, schemes,states that are always already interacting with each other. There is always multiplicity from the start, and yet, inside of multiplicity are temporary states, forms, frames, enclosures.

I write about this.

Heidegger and Derrida on Structure and Form.


Philosophers in the post Hegel era, from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, have recognized that Being, if it is to overcome metaphysics, must take into account, imply, differentiate from, structural beings while not being a structure itself. As a subject constructs and organizes an object via a valuative account, the object is conditioned by this subjective activity. But if that were the end of it, we would not move past Kant’s conditions of possibility. The subject must in turn be reciprocally conditioned by the object. The object grounded by the subject and the subject grounded by the object is a non-grounded grounding, or more precisely, an activity of reciprocal transformation.
. Heidegger was committed to forging a path of thinking integrating, without succumbing to, the dominant philosophical traditions of the 20th century(dialectical and Neo-Kantian subjectivism and positivist empiricism).
Heidegger laid the groundwork for this path in Being and Time. Being distinguishes itself as the unity of the mutual carrying out and trans-formative nature of beings-being. BT's challenge was to formulate the Ontological-Ontic Difference in such a way as to avoid rendering Being as grounding condition of possibility for beings, as unconditioned master concept, a first principle. Via the ontological difference, "Being grounds beings, and beings, as what IS most of all, account for Being. One comes over the other, one arrives in the other. Overwhelming and arrival appear in each other" (Heidegger, Identity and Difference).
With the era initiated by the Kehre, Heidegger further developed a way to think the overcoming of the self-contradiction of a grounding concept that seeks to overcome objectification. Ereignis performs the unity of the difference between Being and Beings as differentiating event.


If Heideggerian Being takes into account, implies, differentiates from, structural beings while not being a structure itself, what does it mean for beings to ’have a structure’? Words like rote and mechanical depict the effects of structure as generator of process of repetition of a dominating theme. And this is what many scholars target in Heidegger’s critique of technology and Gestell. But what is a structure in and of itself, prior to and outside of its production-reproduction? What is the meaning of structure as momentary state, before it is thought as programmatic process, as conversion, formulaic self-unfolding?

Writers endorsing a general account of meaning as non-recuperable or non-coincidental from one instantiation to the next may nonetheless treat the heterogeneous contacts between instants of experience as transformations of fleeting forms, states, logics, structures, outlines, surfaces, presences, organizations, patterns, procedures, frames, standpoints. When thought as pattern, the structural-transcendental moment of eventness upholds a certain logic of internal relation; the elements of the configuration mutually signify each other and the structure presents itself as a fleeting identity, a gathered field. The particularity of eventness is not allowed to split the presumed (temporary) identity of the internal configuration that defines the structure as structure. History would be the endless reframing of a frame, the infinite shifting from paradigm to paradigm.


It is this presumed schematic internality of eventness, the power of abstractive multiplicity given to the sign, which causes experience to be treated as resistant to its dislocation, as a lingering or resistant form, pattern, configuration, infrastructure. Of the numerous philosophers since Hegel who have attempted to resuce the subject-object scheme-content relation from metaphysical domination(Kierkegaard, Gadmaer, Levinas, Nietzsche), Heidegger and Derrida are the first to question and dismantle the very possibility of structure-pattern-scheme as subject or object. How so?

Let us examine the phenomenon of structure more closely. How is structure composed? What is the structurality of structure? Contemporary philosophical thinking outside of Heidegger and Derrida tends to think the spatial frame of structure as enclosure of co-present elements. It is an internality, full presence, a resting in itself and an auto-affection. Structure would be a pattern framing a finite array of elements . It would be a system of classification, a vector or center of organization. We can think pattern in abstract(the structure of democracy) or concrete( the structure of a house) terms. A structure has properties in the minimal sense that it is defined by its center, that which organizes and, determines it thematically as that which is the bearer of its attributes, that according to which its elements are aligned. Structure is plurality of the identical.

If a structure is an organization of elements, those elements themselves are structures. The object is structure in that it is self-presence, its turning back to itself in order to be itself as presence, subsistence, auto-affection, the ‘this as itself’. Therefore structure would be irreducible. It would be the primordial basis of beings as objects (point of presence, fixed origin) as internality, space as frame, subsistence, pure auto-affection, representation , category, law, self-presence itself. Also value, will, norm. So much rides on where we begin from in thinking about beginnings.

In various writings Derrida deconstructs the notion of structure. He argues that structure implies center, and at the center, transformation of elements is forbidden. But he says in fact there is no center, just the desire for center. If there is no center, there is no such singular thing as structure, only the decentering thinking of the structurality of structure.

“Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences.”(Sign, Structure and Play, Writing and Difference p352)


“The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(Limited Inc p53)."


In their essence, Beings don’t HAVE structure or constitution. There is no such THING as a form, a structure, a state. There is no trans-formation but rather a trans-differentiation, (transformation without form, articulation as dislocation) What is being transcended is not form but difference. Each of the elements in the array that define a structure are differences .They do not belong to a structure . They are their own differentiation. There is no gathering, cobbling , synthesis, relating together, only a repetition of differentiation such that what would have been called a form or structure is a being the same differently from one to the next. Not a simultaneity but a sequence. So one could not say that form of nature is the way in which nature transitions through and places itself into the forms and states that, from a schematic perspective, constitute the path of its movement, and nature turns into natural things, and vice versa. Nature would not transition through forms and states, Nature, as difference itself, transitions though differential transitions. Differences are not forms. Forms are enclosures of elements organized according to a rule. Forms give direction. Difference does not give direction, it only changes direction. What are commonly called forms are a temporally unfolding system of differences with no organizing rule, no temporary ‘it’. The transformation is from one differential to the next before one ever gets to a form.

Schemes, conceptual, forms, intentions, willings have no actual status other than as empty ontic abstractions invoked by individuals who nevertheless, in their actual use of these terms, immediately and unknowingly transform the senses operating within (and defining) such abstractions in subtle but global ways concealed by but overrunning what ontically understood symbols, bits, assemblies, bodies, frames and other states are supposed to be , even if (and especially when) Ereignis as transformative event names the overturning of being as Ge-stell. The briefest identification of a so-called state is an unknowing experiencing of temporally unfolding multiplicity of differences. This is the ontological being of the ontic notion of structure, in the service of which Heidegger puts the old word to work as its deconstruction. In Heidegger’s fundamental ontological ‘forms’ one finds nothing like a structure in any commonly understood sense, only what would be difference as the hermeneutical ‘as’, heedful association, ‘being underway’, producing, project, existing, temporality, care, the 'is', disclosiveness.


In BT, ‘What is a Thing’ and other writings, Heidegger describes a structure-thing as the bearer of properties and underlies qualities. A thing is a nucleus around which many changing qualities are grouped, or a bearer upon which the qualities rest, something that possesses something in itself. It has an internal organization. But Heidegger doesn’t settle for this present to hand account. In a gesture allied with Derrida, he thinks the structurality of structure as the Being of beings. But he doesn’t do this by conceiving Being via the transitioning through and placing itself into, the turning toward and away from, structures, forms, schemes. This would be to pre-suppose the metaphysical concept of structure as present to hand state, and thus leave it unquestioned. It would not only leave it unquestioned , but confuse ontological-ontic difference with ontic-ontic difference. What I see Heidegger doing is locating transformation within structure, as Derrida does in his own way. Heidegger’s discussion of propositional statements in BT sec 33 is key here. In this section he derives the apophantic ‘as’ structure of propositional logic from the hermeneutical ‘as’.

As an "ontologically insufficient interpretation of the logos", what the mode of interpretation of propositional statement doesn't understand about itself is that thinking of itself as external 'relating' makes the propositional 'is' an inert synthesis, and conceals its ontological basis as attuned, relevant taking of 'something AS something'. In accordance with this affected-affecting care structure, something is understood WITH REGARD TO something else. This means that it is taken together with it, but not in the manner of a synthesizing relating. Heidegger instead describes the 'as' as a "confrontation that understands, interprets, and articulates, [and] at the same time takes apart what has been put together." Transcendence locates itself in this way within the very heart of the theoretical concept. Simply determining something AS something is a transforming-performing. It "understands, interprets, and articulates", and thereby "takes apart" and changes what it affirms by merely pointing at it, by merely having it happen to 'BE' itself.
Heidegger’s hermeneutical ‘as’ functions as Derrida’s differential system of signs. Something is something only as differential . Articulation of the ‘is’ transforms in order to articulate. That is, articulation, hinge, IS the ‘in order to’. Thus, the problem of the primordial grounding of the ’is', and the analysis of the logos are the same problem.
Heidegger writes:

"...if the formal characteristics of "relation" and "binding" cannot contribute anything
phenomenally to the factual structural analysis of the logos, the phenomenon intended with the term copula finally has nothing to do with bond and binding."(BT,p160)
"The "is" here speaks transitively, in transition. Being here becomes present in the manner of a transition to beings. But Being does not leave its own place and go over to beings, as though beings were first without Being and could be approached by Being subsequently. Being transits (that), comes unconcealingly over (that) which arrives as something of itself unconcealed only by that coming-over." “That differentiation alone grants and holds apart the "between," in which the overwhelming and the arrival are held toward one another, are borne away from and toward each other."(Identity and Difference.p.64)

This is the method of Heidegger’s decentering thinking of the structurality of structure.
The thinking of structure as a singularity implies a multiplicity of supposed ‘parts’ captured in an instant of time. But the assumption that we think this parallel existence of differences at the ‘same time’, as the ‘same space’, organized and centered as a ‘THIS’, must unravel with the knowledge that each differential singular is born of and belongs irreducibly to, even as it is a transformation of, an immediately prior element . Two different elements cannot be presumed to exist at the same time because each single element is its own time(the hinged time of the pairing of a passed event with the presencing of a new event) as a change of place. Thus, whenever we think that we are theorizing two events at the same time, we are unknowingly engaging in a process of temporal enchainment and spatial re-contextualization. The assumption of a spatial frame depends on the ability to return to a previous element without the contaminating effect of time. How can we know that elements of meaning are of the same spatial frame unless each is assumed to refer back to the same ‘pre-existing’ structure?
The same goes for the fixing of a point of presence as a singular object. This pointing to, and fixing of, an itself as itself is a thematic centering that brings with it all the metaphysical implications of the thinking of a structural center. Heidegger’s ‘as’(which is not a structure in itself but a differential) explains, derives and deconstructs form, structure, thing before it can ever establish itself as a ‘this’.

The issue here centers on the understanding of Heideggerian temporality.
Is there a notion of transformation, transcendence, differentiation, event , performance that
doesn't 'take time' but also avoids being a state, concept, intention, presence, structure? Is it possible to think of such a notion without inadvertently lapsing into metaphysical totalization? To fail to deconstruct the concept of structure is to conceive the ‘both-together’ of past-present-future as a conjunction of separate, adjacent phases or aspects: the past which conditions the present entity or event, and the present object which supplements that past. It is not that these these phases are considered as unrelated, only that they each must are presumed to carve out their own temporary identities in order to arrive at a notion of stricture-pattern-scheme as an identity. The association between past and present would be a fracturing, the fracture between Self and Other, between immanence and transcendence, rather than Heidegger’s ecstatic unity. Ontological-Ontic difference is misread as difference between presences. As the overcoming-arriving difference of Heideggerian temporality, it is difference WITHIN presence.
Temporality as a 'split' within will, intention, presence is misread if it is thought as smaller bits of presence. Penetrating the veil of the formal permeating our language of the things within us and around us is not a matter of discovering smaller, faster, dumber, more interactive ‘bits’ within the unities of current approaches, for that would simply displace the issues we’ve discussed onto a miniaturized scale. It is a matter of revealing perhaps an entirely different notion of the basis of entities than that of the freeze-frame state. Being is not an interiority or enclosure(or in between enclosure and overcoming as the event of their differentiation). On the contrary, it exposes and subverts the presumed interiority of conceptuality, representation, will from within its own resources, in the same moment.

To read Being and Time starting from the 'is', not as conceptual binding but as the transit of
'overwhelming and arrival', de-thrones logos, structure, concept and representation, relegating them to where and how we actually find them in BT, as special derived modifications of the hermeutical 'as'.

How are we to do we understand Heidegger's admonitions concerning the
dangers of Gestell? What does one make of those who have not read Heidegger, who have not grasped what he was aiming at, who battle against what they see as the dangerous 'anti-science' relativisms of postmodern thinking, who contribute to the universal objectification of being? As Heidegger points out in Identity and Difference, "the manner in which the matter of thinking-Being-comports itself, remains a unique state of affairs. The inauthentic modes of the ready-to-hand, the present-to-hand, average everydayness, authentic Being, Ereignis all mark different factical experiences. Yet what is common to all possible modes of Being is a certain radical mobility. This means that there is, every moment , within the thinking of each individual who participates in the most apparently rigidly schematic orientations, a radical mobility WITHIN the will to conceptual schematism that is easy to miss (and in fact has been missed for most of Western history , according to Heidegger). Even if the effect of this mobility is subtle enough that it appears for all intents and purposes as though the reign of the dominating objectivizing scheme were absolute, it is crucial to recognize that even in such situations that seem to exemplify the a priori neutralization of otherness, a more originary but radically self-dissimulating a priori, that of Being, is in play, always right now, this instant.

Within and beyond states, forms and structures, lies a universe of barely self-exceeding accents, modulations, aspects, variations, ways of working. Not variations or modulations of STATES but modulations of modulations. The worlds generated from (but never overtaking) this intricate process may be clumsily described via the terminology of patterned interactions between states, but at the cost of missing the profound ongoing internal relatedness and immediacy of this underlying, overflowing movement.
Heidegger reveals Being as an interface both more intrinsically self-transformative and implicatively self-consistent than current views allow for.
The belief in temporary discrete states stifles the intimately interactive potential of their approaches by making the whole works dependent on irreducible units of formal resistance and polarization.
Rather than originating in an invasive, displacing outside. of interactions between partially independent regions, the ‘isness’ of Being is already articulated as intersections of intersections, metaphors of metaphors(as metaphoricity itself), guaranteeing that the person as a whole always functions as an implicatory unity at the very edge of experience. Before there is self or world , there would be this single-split gesture, co-implicating continuity and qualitative transformation in such a way that existing maintains a unity which recognizes itself, at every moment, the ‘same differently’. Aspects hidden within so-called present forms and structures, unique to the implicative thrust of my own existing, belong to me in a fashion that exceeds my own calculative grasp even as it transcends strictly shared social normativity. On the contrary, the radically inseparable interaffecting between my history and new experience exposes me to the world in an immediate, constant and thoroughgoing manner, producing every moment a global reshaping of my sense of myself and others outpacing the transformative impetus realized via a narrative conception of socialization. I am not arguing that the meaning of social cues is simply person-specific rather than located intersubjectively as an impersonal expressive agency. Before there is a pre-reflective personal ‘I’ or interpersonal ‘we’, there is already within what would be considered THE person a fully social site of simultaneously subjective-objective process overtaking attempts to understand human action based on either within-person constancies or between-person conditionings. Events understood as interaffectings of interaffectings, working within and beyond relations among presumed temporary essences (conceptual, affective-bodily, interpersonal), do not achieve their gentle integrative continuity through any positive internal power. On the contrary, they simply lack the formidability of static identity necessary to impose the arbitrariness of conditioning, mapping, mirroring, grafting and cobbling, on the movement of experiential process.



Most readings of Heidegger(Gadamer, Levinas) view the mutual carrying out and trans-formative nature of beings-being as implying, including, and carrying along with it rather than erasing the internal composition of a structure of a being-to-be-modified. Being for them is substance and movement . Being is nature itself as the transformative substance and movement that goes across and beyond formation. Being is the ‘in between’ the subjective conditioning of the object and the objective conditioning of the subject. So the array of elements that are organized and thought together, at once, thematically as this structure-form are carried into their trans-formation(we could also say trans-structuration).

But I have argued here that the purpose of Heidegger's investigation of propositionality is not to identify theoretical objects as ontological givens for Being, but to establish propositional object, concept, representation, Gestell, as ontic existents in order to reveal them more rigorously as grounded ontologically (in the sense of fundamental ontology) in primordial unconcealment. Most readings of Heidegger(Gadamer, Levinas) do the reverse, attempting to ground fundamental ontology, and all of the modal analyses which spring from it, in what for Heidegger is the ontic plane of propositional representation.
In other words, they reduce the ontological difference to a difference between two ontic determinations. Being conceived as the performative difference between schematism and existence is a difference between two ontic determinations and therefore is itself on the ontic plane of propositionality. It is a present to hand thinking masquerading as post-metaphysical.

When one begins from the subjectivism of representationality, the way of out of Kantian a priorism must stand as the absolute other to representation, that is to say, it must arrive in the guise of the performance of the differentiation between Subjective structuring and Objective determination. Only in this way can the empirically conditioned and contingent beginning of thought avoid being mistaken for a Kantian unconditioned ground of possibility. Heidegger and Derrida give us a way to avoid grounding fundamental ontology in the performative difference between schematism and existence as its condition of possibility.

I notice that when you talk about the contribution of biology to gendered behavior you emphasize drives and impulses. What kinds of drives and impulses can be controlled so as to fit into the accepted cultural norms? Well, obviously, who one goes to bed with can be controlled. And the clothes one choose to wear. Or maybe not as much as we think. The question is what are the limits to control of gender expression, and if there are limits, why?
You'll notice that I focused on the underlying perceptual processing level of gendered psychology. If we fully appreciate how globally and primordially psychological masculine-feminine 'brain physiology' shapes our experience of the world, maybe you can agree that for those on the far ends of the 'brain physiology' gender spectrum, the effects of brain function on gendered behavior work at a level well below the ability of someone to mask these effects, or in many cases to be even aware of them. Thus, the situation where everyone else knows someone is gay before they do, even if they don't pursue anyone sexually.

It may be a stereotype, but it is still useful to look at the list of feminized attributes that are associated with gay men on the far end of the spectrum. Limp wrist, feminine walk, lisp and often higher voice, interest in what are generally considered girly activities like playing with dolls,throws like a girl, choose fashion and color and hairstyle that are considered feminine, even when they aren't aware of it.
The point is that there are so many tendencies to perceive and to act that can be associated with the far end of the gay male (and lesbian) spectrum due to brain wiring that it is impossible to control , or even be aware of all of these, and many families will point out that such behaviors became noticeable from a very early age. That's why there has always been a category throughout cultural history, in diverse societies, for highly feminized males, those who cannot disguise their perceptual gender. The only effect of culture on these individuals is an indirect one. They have has to be careful of whom they were seen having sex with in order to avoid punishment, but otherwise made their way through society as an 'other', despite their most desperate attempts to fit in.
Most of the discussion around controlling and choosing psychological gender pertain to those near the middle of the spectrum whose brain wired gender doesn't make them stand out in relation to the binary category their chromosomes put them in. these individuals have always been able to 'pass' as normal relative to whatever social conventions dominated if they so chose.
Transgender as a category is multifaceted, overlapping but not mirroring issues pertaining to brain wiring. Some feminized biological males may feel they were born in the wrong body, and others may not. and some males toward the middle of the brain wiring spectrum may want to to change their physical gender identity. This can sometimes result in a situation of a female-appearing , masculine-acting transgender identity(Caitlyn Jenner?).

If empathy simply means the desire or attempt to see the world from the other person's perspective, the obviously the desire in and of itself doesnt guarantee insight. If , however, the real question youre asking is what is the potential fro understanding someone from their perspective such as to be able to identify with their behavior, views, choices, I would say it is unlimited. I would also say that the history of cultual evolution is a history of a gradual development of the ablity to see the other as less and less foreign and alien. Changes in our systems of justice and punishment relfect these developing insights. We can and do get better at figuring out the behavior of living things. after all, it wasnt too long ago that we believed that non-humans could not use tools, had no language or emotion, had no cognition or culture that they passed down,, etc.

Just keep in mind that your understanding of intentionality as information-based, while adequate for the purposes of artificial intelligence, doesn't jibe with more recent approaches within cognitive science and philosophy.

"Das Man is 'there' as the horizon for both our involvement comportments with equipment and our solicitous encounters with the Others."

It may be 'there' in that it is equiprimordial, but then so are all of the other modes of inauthentic Dasein.
"World gives itself to Dasein in each case as the respective whole of its "for the sake of itself," i.e., for the sake of a being that is equioriginarily being alongside what is present at hand, being with the Dasein of others, and being toward itself."(Pathmarks)
So the present to hand and the ready to hand must also be already 'there' in our absorption in the world as we find ourselves along-side entities in the world. But that doesn't mean that each of these modes is directly accessible to us simultaneously for phenomenological investigation. That's why they're called modes.

I'm simply saying what Heidegger is saying, A change in focus of investigation from the ready to hand to a different mode of being or phenomenon must take place in order to allow us to answer the question of the 'who' of Dasein as self, subject , Mit-Sein, the 'they' .

"All of the structures of being of Da-sein, thus also the phenomenon that answers to
this question of who, are modes of its being.Thus the answer to the question of the 'who' is a mode of being. By investigating in the direction of the phenomenon which allows us to answer the question of the who, we are led to structures of Da-sein which are equiprimordial with being-in-the-world: being-with and Mitda-sein. In this kind of being, the mode of everyday being a self is grounded whose explication makes visible what we might call the " subject" of everydayness, the they ."

Many reasons. To start with, they miss Nietzssche's critique of the will as wanting what it wants, as grasping, as present-to itself. Swecond, they don't deconstruct the notion of structre and form, seeing temporality and existence and affectivity in terms of movement form one temporary structure to the next. For Heidegger and Derrida, structures and forms are not in-themselves enclosures that are then transformed. IF you look at models of intersubjetive processes that are compatible with the Kierkegaardian-Levinasian reading of Heidegger, they rely on an irreducible polarization and violence in the way that meaning is conditioned and shaped culturally.

"The perception of gender is the social construct."
Perception of gender in terms of how we move our bodies, how we process perceptual information, how we perceive others in terms of sexual attraction, is not simple socially constructed. If I were to take you in a time machine back to when you were still in the womb and flood your brain with certain sex hormones , your brain physiology would be altered in terms of gendered perceptual-affective processing(such studies have been done on lab animals). I could steer you in more of a masculine or feminine direction. I'm not saying that the definition of masculinity and femininity is fixed, though. It changes throughout human history as a consequence of the interaction between biology and culture, but there is an underlying brain physiology basis that is independent of culture.

Yes, indeed, but have you heard of the interpretration of fact and value? Goes something like this:

"To be objective, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be
designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects? Let us look at an extended example from the philosopher Nelson Goodman.

A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length: If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or
a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is.
And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core."

"Das Man is that in terms of which the ready-to-hand and present-at-hand, as encountered, are. So Das Man is not encountered at all, it is the constitutive of that wherein any entity is *to us*. "

If we look at the ready to hand, it is also that in terms of which entities are encountered, and of course one can say the same for the present at hand.They are modes in terms of which we encounter beings in the world.. You're right that ontically we never explicitly encounter Das Man, any more that we encounter the mode of the ready to hand or the present to hand as ontological conditions of possibility for the entities that appear to us.
But ontologically, I think that Das Man as a way in which entities appear to us is different in kind than modes like the present to hand. Das Man pertains to the mode of everyday being a self(and being with other Daseins) rather than being-with-objects.

It is true that, along with, or equiprimordial with, the ready to hand grasping of a hammer in terms of our heedful circumspective relation to it, is our understanding of it in terms of its larger relevance with regard to human activities that it is being used for . And in regard to this larger context of human activity that 'frames' the meaning of the tool in its being used, Das Man pertains to the way that Dasein initially and for the most part comports itself as this Being-with-others in ambiguity, levelling down and averageness.
But its harder to think of what this averageness, levelling down, ambiguous understanding consists in if we remain focused on our use of a hammer.

When we think of examples of Das Man such as idle talk, concern for, concern with and curiosity, the meaning of this averageness and levelling down becomes clear(not for the person in their ontic existence, but ontologically clear for the philosopher) , even if this average everydayness is implied in all situations of inauthentic existence, including solitary uses of a tool.

I'm curious, what family of philosophers do you read Heidegger in proximity with?
As you know, there are many Heidegger camps. The oldest in the U.S. and probably still most dominant is what I dub the Kierkegaardian Heideggerians. They often reside in theology deparrtments at Catholic universities , and include Hubert Dreyfus, Thom Sheehan, John Sallis, John Caputo, Mark Wrathatl. I dont agree with their reading of Hedeigger. I think they miss what is most radical about him. I much prefer Derrida's analysis.

Rationality means nothing outside of a system of valuation. So 'ought' orients and organizes the meaning of any system of facts by requiring facts to be interpreted according to a scheme or paradigm.. 'Obedience to' a condition of possiblity is the way that things make sense according to a framework. Changing frameworks amounts to obeying a new master.